As wildfires rage through Los Angeles, it’s nearly impossible to find anyone who believes local or state officials have effectively handled the disaster. With tens of thousands of acres burned, thousands of buildings reduced to ash, and at least five lives lost, the situation remains grave, with no containment in sight. The situation is so bad that the state’s woefully inadequate response has garnered as much attention as the fires themselves.
But something tells me that others will rewrite history.
We’ve been covering the inadequacies of the state and local response to the wildfires here at PJ Media, and while this devastating incompetence seems obvious to us, it’s getting praise in some circles.
“The stereotype of lesbians always being prepared for an emergency — everyone knows a queer woman who doesn’t leave the house without a Leatherman multitool and carabiners — holds true for Los Angeles’ first openly LGBTQ+ Fire Chief Kristin Crowley who is overseeing the firefighters trying to stop the Palisades fire,” writes an LGBTQ website called Pride.
The article continues by recapping the devastation and going into a full-throttled defense of Crowley, whom the article claims is getting backlash on social media from conservatives for being a DEI hire who wasn’t qualified for the position.
As we’ve reported before, Crowley, who is celebrated as the first openly gay and female leader of the department, has spent her tenure more focused on DEI initiatives than readiness and preparedness. Under her leadership, millions of taxpayer dollars were funneled into creating a DEI bureau within the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD). This included programs aimed at recruiting more women and LGBTQ+ firefighters, even as the department faced a $17.6 million budget cut in 2024.
Related: How Wokeism Created the L.A. Wildfire Crisis
Crowley criticized those cuts at the time, yet it seems she didn’t consider reallocating funds from her DEI agenda to bolster the department’s actual preparedness efforts. I guess she didn’t want to take money away from increasing the number of lesbian and transgender firefighters in order to ensure that the department had the resources to effectively respond to emergencies.
Los Angeles firefighters ran out of water early Wednesday morning as they battled the blaze. There is enough blame to go around here, and Crowley isn’t solely responsible for the poor response. Fire hydrants went dry despite California voters approving a $7.5 billion water bond back in 2014, yet the state has been slow to move on the project. Despite years of droughts and increasingly devastating wildfires, California has not constructed a new reservoir in 45 years. As a result, precious water continues to flow into the ocean, wasted due to the state’s insufficient reservoir capacity.
Next is Mayor Karen Bass, whose $17 million budget cuts to the Los Angeles Fire Department “severely limited” the department’s ability to respond to "large-scale emergencies.” She ignored warnings of the coming windstorm and went to Africa as the wildfire disaster broke out. Barack Obama endorsed Bass, who is black, back in 2022. For what it's worth, she is getting called out for taking her trip to Africa; we'll have to see if there will be significant criticism from the mainstream media about her budget cuts or if she'll eventually get praise for her crisis management as the first black female mayor of Los Angeles.
But the Ministry of Truth is already out there praising Crowley's disastrous and incompetent response as a job well done.
